


The Blue Place

by who_won_the_race_back_home



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Background characters - Freeform, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 18:12:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13082481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/who_won_the_race_back_home/pseuds/who_won_the_race_back_home
Summary: In the light of the full moon, crow feathers reflect a blue so deep it’s almost black. They call it The Blue Place now.





	The Blue Place

They don’t remember it being called the Green Place. They remember the women, they remember clean water, and the crops. They remember the green, but they do not remember the name.

In the light of the full moon, crow feathers reflect a blue so deep it’s almost black. They call it The Blue Place now.

Too many days ago to keep track of, less than The Citadel’s raid, more than the blaze of bullets and war drums following a runaway guzzolene tanker, the crops began to die. It was slow, at times too slow for them to notice. Years of less after less and slowly growing hungrier and hungrier.

Then the first child died, barely three years old, stomach bloated from malnutrition and want. Her mother wailed while harvesting meager remnants from once fertile, beautiful, green land. She screamed and beat her fist against swampy sand littered with dry stalks. All the women surrounded her to mourn together. The men stared at the ground.

They stared at the ground for countless days more. There were no more children born after that. Without a clear purpose, they were left to sow whatever was left. A pittance. The women didn’t know what to do with them anymore, but they were not cruel. They were allowed to live, but perhaps that was worse.

One of them climbed a tree with a net salvaged from the old world and managed to catch one of the crows that had begun to roost on the perimeter of their village. He gave it to the leader. She gave him the first thanks he had ever received. And the last.

Soon their only job became to hunt these crows. They all decided to stop pretending the crops were going to come back. They hunted crows and drank the sour water that leeched up from the ground, but it was not enough. More children died, more and more until there was no more wailing, just the resigned ritual of mourning.

For a while the women built up an elaborate system of shacks on stilts and walkways, hastily thrown together. The crow fishers stayed banished. They built stilts from the dead branches of the trees they slept in, learned to walk on all fours like the creatures they were always treated as. Their clothes rotted from the damp of the ground. They made new ones from the feathers of their quarry to protect them from a deadly sun that still never dried up the poisoned land, no matter how hot in shone.

Eventually, the water they drank allowed the fishers to hear the crows. The brilliant black birds spoke and told them they understood why they must be hunted, but in return their bodies had to be honored. They built beautiful traps and kites to snare the birds, said long prayers of thanks before killing and offering them to the women. The women did not respect the prayers. They did not hear the crows.

The women left.

One day, without warning, they brought in their kills, but the women and the few remaining children were gone, their elevated home abandoned without a trace. The crows were not enough.

But the crows were enough for them.

The women never had understood how to live here. How beautiful the birds were in the blue of the night. The privilege it was to consume them and honor their bodies. The village on stilts stayed abandoned, they continued to live in the trees like the crows, with their shrines of nets and wires and kites, their cloaks of black feathers and skulls.

In the beautiful land of the Blue Place. 

**Author's Note:**

> This had been sitting as a half finished draft on my desktop for literally two years and I started writing it before we got some of the background info on them, but I tried to incorporate what the production team has given us. I'm not sure if I'm totally satisfied with it, but it felt great to finish, so.


End file.
